"Dead Men Don't Drink Water."

He wouldn't give up. He kept putting the bottle to the man's lips. The water would pour down his chin, onto his chest, the bed, and the floor. My colleague couldn't stand it anymore, and yelled at the young intern, "Stop it! Dammit! Dead men don't drink water!" A bit of wisdom that we all would do well to remember.

The time, early third millennium. The place, Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. It was a tough time in that beautiful island nation. The war between the predominately Buddhist Sinhalese government and the Hindu Tamil Tigers had gone on for decades and still went on and on, with unknown tens-of-thousands of dead. The Tigers controlled maybe 20% of the island and ran their piece of it with an iron fist. They had a highly sophisticated and well-armed military force--mostly equipped with North Korean weapons--that gave the Sri Lankan army, navy, and air force no end of trouble. The Tigers could fight both as a conventional force and as guerrillas/terrorists. Among other things, they had perfected the suicide vest. We had seen a steady parade of these, many worn by women. The vest was controlled by a Tiger-made battery-run timer that once powered up could not be turned off; attempting to remove the vest would detonate it.

While the Tigers were relatively careful not to target foreigners, especially Americans, Canadians, and Britons (much of their funding came from expats in those countries), when dealing with suicide vests that spew ball bearings in crowded places, how do you define careful? The Diplowife, for example, missed getting mangled thanks to her inability to arrive on time. Invited to a ladies' tea, something she detested, she was to be picked up by a couple of other invitees. Running late, of course, at the last moment she called to say she would take her own driver. Her friends skipped our residence only to drive right into a blast. A suicide bomber, being chased on foot by the police ran into the middle of the street and detonated, killing the policeman closest to him and spraying two passing cars with ball bearings and bits of his own body. Those vehicles contained the Diplowife's friends on their way to the tea. One woman absorbed several ball bearings as well as pieces of the car; her driver, also hit, nearly bled to death. The Diplowife, who was supposed to be in that car, arrived at the tea, which, of course, could not be cancelled, just as a gardner was hosing the blood and flesh off the other car.

After years and years of this, the war had become about nothing; better said, the war was about the war. Every atrocity by one side fueled the other's passion for more war. When the British departed Ceylon in early 1948, they left a country with the highest per capita GDP in Asia. It had one of the world's highest literacy rates, and was widely seen as a model of peaceful democratic rule. A young Lee Kuan Yew, who would go on to become one of the truly great statesmen of the latter half of the twentieth century, saw Ceylon as the model for Malaya and later Singapore. That did not last long, confirming my long held belief that people do not want to live in paradise. A country with no foreign enemies, a benign climate, ample resources, a great education system, and nicely plugged into the world economy soon degenerated into a bloody civil war. Sinhalese politicians resented that the Tamil minority, thanks to their higher proficiency in English, the country's official language, did better economically and in terms of university admissions and plum government jobs than did the Sinhalese majority. In the 1950s, Sinhalese politicians changed the official language from English to Sinhalese, made it mandatory for universities, and began to change the country's place names to Sinhalese; Buddhism gradually became the state religion in all but name. The country's old romantic and evocative name of Ceylon was discarded and changed to Sri Lanka. An active discrimination was launched against the Tamils in government jobs and contracts. The reaction was fierce. The war was on. What justice there had been in the origins of the Tamil revolt was soon washed away by a wave of extreme violence directed against innocent Sinhalese people. The Sinhalese retaliated, and the vicious cycle commenced. I won't go into the duplicitous role played by India in the whole crisis, a role which greatly exacerbated the suffering in Sri Lanka, and led to the 1991 assassination of India's Rajiv Gandhi near Chenai, India by a woman Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.

When I was there, we worked with the Norwegians to find a political settlement to the crisis. We were operating under instructions that ruled out military victory. I remember sending an analytical message saying that military victory over the Tigers was entirely possible; it was just a matter of how many casualties one wished to accept. My cable did not go down well in DC. The dominant wisdom was that the war's end had to be negotiated. After many hits-and-misses we hit on a formula that I called the "Milton Friedman Plan." It would leave aside the big political issues and try to end the isolation of the Tiger controlled region. It would focus on economics. We sold it to the government with the theory that the end of military checkpoints and blockades, and allowing free travel throughout the country would in the end benefit both the Sinhalese majority and the by-now impoverished Tamil minority. It would undermine the iron-grip that the Tigers had on the zone they controlled. Let the market dictate without the politicians getting involved. The Tiger side reluctantly accepted the formula because of the extreme hardships being endured in the Tiger controlled regions, and because the tide of war had begun to swing against them. They needed a break. They, for example, had lost control of the ancient city of Jaffna to a determined and very bloody Sri Lankan army campaign. I remember visiting the city after it had been secured. I had never seen such urban devastation outside of a city run by US Democrat party politicians. Jaffna looked like a tropical Stalingrad; there was barely a building left unscathed by explosives or not pockmarked by bullets. Unexploded ordnance seemed everywhere. The Tigers occasionally still would lob artillery rounds into the city.

The Norwegian brokered deal, with the strong backing of the US and the UK, did, for a time, lead to a halt in the fighting. The country breathed a sigh of relief. The lights came back on in Colombo, and the ubiquitous military patrols and roadblocks were halted and dismantled. I was asked to drive out to the old city of Trincomalee and see how "peace" was working along the east coast. The area around that old city and former British naval base had been a center of the fighting. We had orders to check on the status of the Muslim population in the region, given the many reports of both sides considering the small Muslim minority as an enemy. I won't go into too many details of the drive; suffice it to say that it was long and colorful and provided anecdotes with which I have bored people at cocktail parties for years. I went with a colleague from the political section and a young, bright and eager intern. We stopped along the way at the British cemetery and paid our respects to the British and American sailors buried there from WWII. Despite the fighting, both sides had respected the cemetery, and it was in surprisingly good shape. As we moved along the highways, our large white Chevy Suburban would draw the attention of Tigers; dressed in black and usually two to a motorbike, they would swarm around our vehicle trying to peer in through our heavily tinted windows at the strange occupants within. We would drive on like a big white steamship escorted by playful porpoises--if one imagines playful porpoises carrying RPGs and AKs.

We visited Trincomalee and then began a drive down the coast to Batticaloa stopping along the way to visit the local Muslim population. The leader of the community was a distinguished doctor who arranged a meeting with Muslim dignitaries for us in a local hospital. He had a long table, loaded with food and drink, set up in a narrow airless hallway in the hospital. There must have been some thirty or forty dignitaries invited, along with the press. My two colleagues from the embassy and I sat at the head of the table with the host. The TV camera lights added to the intense heat in that stuffy hall.

One speaker after another rose to give us his--they were all men--views on the current situation in the country and the world. The speeches were long, flowery, and very repetitive. Each speaker ignored what the previous one had said, and each had pretty much the same to say. One speaker about three chairs down on my left rose and gave a particularly long and flowery address; he grew increasingly animated as he spoke, his face getting redder and redder, with the veins on his neck bulging as his oratory grew in loudness and intensity. He stopped mid-sentence, sat down, and closed his eyes. I noticed that he immediately urinated. The other speakers looked at him, applauded, and the next one rose to speak. I leaned over to our host, a doctor, mind you, and asked, "Is he OK?" The doctor replied, "He gets very emotional. No problem." About five minutes later, the man sitting next to the now very silent previous speaker, began to shake him, and announced, "I think he's dead!"

That silenced the speakers and a commotion ensued as the dead man was taken to one of the hospital rooms. For some reason our intern followed the procession very closely carrying a bottle of water. The man was laid out on a bed, and our intern began the activity noted at the outset of this post. He seemed not to want to acknowledge that death had paid our little group a visit, and insisted on trying to get the dead man to drink a bit of water. It didn't work.

We returned to the table, and our host announced the sad news to the others. The next speaker rose and began to give his speech. My colleague from the political section had had enough, and said, "No! The meeting is over!" We gave our condolences to the group and headed to our waiting Suburban. The intern still clutched his water bottle and seemed genuinely puzzled by what had happened. "He wouldn't drink the water," he said several times as our vehicle began moving out.

Y2K and The Great Sequester Panic of 2013!

And they say that other generation was "The Greatest."

Harrumph! I beg your pardon!

That other generation only had to deal with fascism, nazism, and Japanese imperialism. Do you know how many apocalypses I have seen and had to handle in my sixty years? Why it's, uh . . . well . . . at least . . . well, it's a helluva lot, that's how many! I don't have enough fingers and toes to count them all.

Here are a few, and just a few, of the many apocalypses I have encountered and overcome. One of my earliest memories of an impending apocalypse was the strontium 90 (90Sr) crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s. We were all getting massive doses of 90Sr in our milk and water because of above ground nuclear testing; our teeth and hair were going to fall out; we were all going to end up looking like a cross of James Carville, Alan Cranston, and Pete Postlethwaite. I managed to survive. And I haven't even mentioned how I handled and survived the constant threat of nuclear war for some forty or fifity years: I spent my early youth diving under school desks in anticipation of Soviet nukes. Those desks were very well built back then as evidenced by the fact that I survived (or maybe it was because . . . nah, it was the desks). Then we were told that pollution was going to kill us all; we would have to survive a massive global cooling caused by the particles in the air blocking the sunlight. Then, in no particular order, I had to deal with race riots, SARS, AIDS, anthrax, and global warming. All of them were going to destroy us all! I have handled them all--don't worry about those any more.

My favorite all-time panic, however, wasn't any of those. I loved, absolutely loved the Y2K panic. It was my favorite--did I mention that? You remember that crisis right? As the calendar clicked over from 1999 to 2000 all of modern civilization would come to a halt. The presence of "00" was going to prove too much, just way too much for our poor computerized society. Our machines would crash! Our robot slaves would collapse or go berserk! The only solution was massive government spending! All those FORTRAN developers were yanked out of their rest homes and brought back to fix this disaster.

I remember being in the State Department and the panic was palpable. State, along with all sorts of other government agencies, got millions from Congress to help us deal with the dreaded "00" apocalypse. That crisis cost me my New Year's party for 1999-2000. I was forced to work that night along with others monitoring the collapse of Western society. There was no "party like it is 1999" for me. We had big charts with "red," "yellow," and "green" columns for different stages of preparedness for different aspects of society. We had spent millions developing these charts, and we had to be up all night ensuring that our money had been well-spent. I spent that night in the Embassy in Panama, monitoring the impending collapse of the Canal--this despite assurances from the engineers that the Canal operated on late 19th century technology and that back then engineers did not fear "00" or any other numbers.

The evening was a bust. The sun rose on the year 2000. The birds sang. The ocean waves waved. We had nothing to report back to anxious Washington DC--assuming DC had survived that horrid and dangerous night. We had to report something. So being the Diplomad, I reported as though it were April 1. I had noticed that my car had gathered an exceptional amount of dust overnight; I attributed it to the horrors of "00." I also noted that the omelets at a local five star hotel had been overdone--"00," obviously. And so on. I rediscovered that DC has no sense of humor. The anxious apocalypse watchers did not appreciate levity, or a reminder of the millions they had spent on nonsense.

You know, on second thought, despite having declared Y2K my favorite panic, I might be in the process of changing my mind. The Great Sequester Panic of 2013 is rapidly moving up the charts. It seems that because the government cuts a tiny percentage from its projected growth in spending, it's all over for us. I never realized how we all lived on the razor's edge! A slightly less robust growth in deficit spending means that my children will be eating fish loaded with mercury, airplanes will be flying without air traffic controllers, every illegal alien ever detained will have to be released, the US military will have to stand down, McDonald's will be serving donkey burgers, all children will get left behind, seniors will fight for scraps of offal, and on and on and on. This all goes to show how incredibly efficient the government is; it can do all these things with about $82 billion! Without that sum, all must come to a halt. Never mind the other $3 plus trillion--I guess those don't count.

Yes, I am going to enjoy this panic.  I can handle it.

The Father Buries His Son: Chavez is Dead

It seems Hugo Chavez finally and formally has died. No more Schrödinger's Cat, both dead and alive at the same time. 

A smart, savvy, unscrupulous street thug with natural political and leadership capabilities, Chavez had hoped to be the heir to the Castros' "Revolution." Instead, the old hermanos gallegos in Havana watch yet another politician, another pretender to their throne, shuffle off while they remain--thanks largely to Chavez's largesse with Venezuela's oil wealth which saved the Castro regime from the Castro regime. The parents bury their son.

Chavez was both an old style Big Man and a new style media star. He knew how to provoke the United States just enough to establish his street credentials with the left and the dopes in Hollywood, but not enough to share the fate of Manuel Noriega, Osama Bin-laden, or Saddam Hussein. He set up a classic peronista system of populist rhetoric, class warfare, and a tolerance for massive corruption by the inner circle. Using a skillful political ju-jitsu, he took advantage of Venezuela's democracy. He used the language and theater of nationalism, revolution, and populism to become Venezuela's most successful corruptocrat, all the while decrying Venezuela's propensity for electing corruptocrats. Proclaiming his love for democracy, he bit-by-bit dismantled Venezuela's democratic institutions and suppressed the opposition. While spouting a nationalist creed, he surrendered his country's sovereignty to the Castros, drug traffickers, and terrorists--all the while making sure that he did not damage his access to the US market and the dollars he needed to be the "anti-American" star of the left.

In short, his was a bravura performance which has left Venezuela awash in debt, crime, and poverty--the signature achievement of leftism everywhere in the world.

"Not From a Good Family"

I have a teenaged daughter: smart, funny, well read, multilingual, intensely patriotic, acerbic or charming as needed, and--woe is me--pretty. Lots of drama, of course, as teenaged girls seem vying for Oscars 24 hours a day. They all carry the Meryl Streep gene.

Having such a daughter creates a four-letter problem for me, to wit, boys. I don't like them around her; I don't want her talking about or to the vile creatures. I know what boys are like . . . sigh . . . probably a losing battle. Since, therefore, it seems highly unlikely that we will get rid of the boys, the least the Diplowife and I can do is make sure she dates one from--drumroll--a "good family." How to tell if the daughter is dating someone from a "good family"? That is the topic of today's 99% politics-free post.

A warning: After all these years, my memory is an improperly scraped and reused palimpsest. Bits and pieces of the previous mix in with the later. Hard to keep it all in exact chronological order, but here I go.

The place, Guatemala. The time, 1989-91. I worked at the Embassy for a terrific political appointee Ambassador--now sadly deceased--and had a great job, great friends, great guns, and an adventuresome life for a relatively young man. The political situation in the country was highly unstable. We didn't know it at the time but the big Communist guerrilla movements were in their death throes; what we saw was that they still created a lot of mayhem both in Guatemala and in neighboring El Salvador. I remember one visit to El Salvador: warm tropical night,  floating on an air mattress in a friend's pool, smoking a good Honduran Don Tomas, watching the helicopters overhead pumping tracer rounds into the mountainside while a Special Forces buddy floating next to me explained, between drags on his cigar, what was happening. In Guatemala, too, I remember eating at a nice outdoors restaurant in Ciudad Vieja, while a T-33 dropped bombs on guerrilla positions in the nearby hills. War as a spectator sport; war as pre-entre entertainment; war as a vignette. No real thought about real people killed and injured.

Guatemala City lay under a thick fog of unease, more than the usual for that troubled place. The guerrillas had hit the power lines, causing intermittent blackouts; the death squads were very active; ordinary criminals were taking advantage of the unrest; home owners and businessmen were taking the law into their own hands, setting homeless men on fire, and having hit men kill street urchins and vagrants. We had the kids sleep on the floor because of the nightly gunfire, most of it from drunk or spooked guards in neighboring houses. To add to the festivities, somebody had brought crates of Chinese grenades. These soon began showing up in the oddest places. A store got held up at "grenade point." In another store, the owner defended his establishment by throwing a grenade at the would-be robbers. One morning somebody in a passing car flung one of the things at the Embassy; it hit the perimeter wall, bounced into the street and went off with a window-shaking roar. Who was behind it? Nobody knew. Lots of theories; lots of explanations; no resolution. The grenades continued to go off.

So what does one do under these circumstances? Go out to dinner. Guatemala City had an amazing number of superb restaurants. One night, the Diplowife and I were having such a dinner at an excellent Mexican restaurant in the city's "Zona Rosa," when we heard some shots, and a very loud crash followed by a blast. The mariachis stopped playing, and the waiters froze . . . for about a second, and then the music and serving resumed. We had finished eating and were paying, so the Diplowife said the appropriate thing to do was to go see what had occurred. We walked down the street towards the El Camino Real Hotel; a crowd had gathered at the entrance, cars, police, military . . . and us.  We made our way to the front of this crowd. Two cars had collided. The driver of one was dead in his car, apparently shot by hotel security. His passenger had flown through the windshield and landed in the street. The grenade this passenger had been carrying had gone off, blowing away his hand and shredding the side of his head. He lay face down in the street, his pants part way down his legs.

The Diplowife surveyed the scene and offered her professional verdict, "He did not come from a good family. He is wearing red underwear. "

So now, my friends, you know. Before you allow your daughter to go to the movies with that kid she met at school, you check the punk's underwear. If it's red, throw him out. If, of course, he happens to be carrying hand grenades, you might also use that datum to question your daughter's judgment in boys.

I provide the above as a free public service for the parents of teenaged daughters.

Obama: Losing Nixon-Slayer

Aside from classic fairy tales, or shall we say faery tales, I never cared much for stories of magic, shape-shifting, or dragons. I always found that bringing in mystical or magical forces was a cheap way for an unimaginative writer to get out of a problem in a story--much as now in modern movies we see computers used to find some magical data that clinches the case against the bad guy. I try to avoid hobbit, vampire, Alec Baldwin, and zombie movies, and, therefore, resisted watching HBOs "Game of Thrones" (GOT).

Tangent Alert!  Why do actors, except for Kirk Douglas, in almost every drama involving ancient Romans, Greeks, wizards, gladiators, dragons, mythical gods and beings, have to speak with British accents and use faux-Shakespearean syntax? Did Julius Caesar have a British accent? Was reading Shakespeare a requirement in ancient Rome and Greece? Just wondering. End of Tangent Alert!

OK, back to today's story. Still suffering from my knee issue, I had little to do except lie about the house, whine, growl, and complain, so my kids insisted that I watch GOT. I, reluctantly, did so. It's ok, although I could do without the magic spells, witches, dragons, and extreme violence and vulgarity. I, however, did like two characters in particular: Khal Drogo, a well-coifed Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, who sweeps all before him, and the one called "King Slayer" for having slain a mad monarch. What does this have to do with anything important? Not much, except I like saying Khal Drogo--might name my next dog that. I also notice that just about everybody goes around armed: a good thing.

Where was I? Oh, yes, going on about Drogo and "King Slayer." I don't see any Drogos on the scene--Allan West, Bibi Netanyahu, and Ted Cruz come closest--but we do have a proven "King Slayer," well, actually a Nixon-Slayer. I speak, of course, of Bob Woodward, a long-time Washington fixture and liberal icon held up to two or three generations of journalism students as the ideal investigative newsman. It seems, however, that Obama has managed to offend Woodward. The man who brought Nixon down--well, helped Nixon bring Nixon down--has rightly labelled Obama's behavior on the international scene as a "madness." Woodward, despite being a liberal, seems to be a patriot and understands the parlous state of the international scene and the need for resolute US behavior. He underlines something which many of us on the right have long said, to wit, the President's main responsibility under the Constitution is to defend the United States from its enemies. It is not to propose or defend massive welfare and other entitlement programs; not to give vacuous speeches at college commencements; not even to play golf. No. His clearest responsibility is to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and to deal with our enemies from a position of strength. He cannot say that we will not deploy a carrier to the Gulf because the GOP won't give him more money for Obamacare.

Obama is playing a stupid and dangerous poker with our nation's security, one that could cost American lives. He is playing typical urban Mayor vs. City Council politics: "Councilman, if you don't give me what I want, then I am shutting down the police and fire stations in your district." Obama, once again, has revealed himself as a mean little man with no appreciation for the role of his country in the world. He would rather put our national interests at stake than save money by not flying off on the taxpayers' money to play golf.

It is somewhat refreshing to see a "liberal icon" take note of the "madness" of King Barack I. How long before Woodward gets trashed by the liberal Mau-Mau machine and has to eat his words? We'll see.

No Politics For You and Funeral Showers

I want to avoid politics today. I am going to try write about stuff that has nothing to do with politics. Here goes.

The Oscars? Didn't watch them. Haven't watched in years. When I was kid the Oscars were a big deal. Now, who cares? A bunch of movies most of us have not seen, very often dealing with and glorifying social deviancy. I also heard that Michelle "Helmet Head" Obama made an appearance at the show.  That . . . oh, never mind. No politics today, no politics today . . .

The only movie I saw was "Argo" which won best picture. I have written before about that film, noting that it was a good straight-forward, basic feat of story-telling with about 80% accuracy. Not bad. It, however, was a politically correct film: no mention of Ronald Reagan or the 1980 election; featured an interview with Jimmy Carter as the credits rolled; and, of course, a couple of Hollywood producers were the co-heroes. I gather the libs were up in arms about "Zero Dark Thirty" because it is allegedly inaccurate in its portrayal of the importance that Bush administration "enhanced interrogation" played in getting the information that led to Bin Ladin. Suddenly Hollywood liberals are concerned about accuracy in films?!? Will we see Oliver Stone and Michael Moore put before the firing squad? Right. Deep breathing, no politics today, no politics today, no politics today . . .

My wife has been invited to a wedding shower. In the course of our lives we all have been to innumerable wedding showers, baby showers, retirement parties, bar mitzvahs, bachelor parties, etc. I want to propose something else: funeral showers. I wrote many years ago (reposted here) that modern science has moved us well beyond our design specifications. I believe that nature wanted us out of the way by the time we turn forty: notice that everything you need to avoid becoming a saber-toothed tiger's lunch begins to go by that age. We become a burden on the tribe. Most of us, or at least those of us who live in the scientific West and refuse to live "organic" lifestyles, can reasonably expect to live into our 80s and beyond. That gives us plenty of time to hold a funeral shower. I am not talking about planning your funeral--who cares?--or leaving detailed instructions on what you want done with you and your stuff (I understand that my kids want me to die on a Tuesday night as Wednesday morning is trash pick-up day.)

I am talking about holding a party when you're still healthy enough to hold one and making it your funeral shower. Gifts are to be expected and you should register at your local Corvette or Kimber Arms dealer. I want presents! I want to hear flowery and inaccurate speeches praising all of my inconsequential achievements while I am still able to do so. I think Vegas would be a great destination for funeral showers--and Nevada is a concealed carry state.

You see, this is what happens when I go cold turkey on politics . . .

The Hammering Yammering of The Buffoon Elites

It is getting harder and harder to write anything worthwhile about the domestic and international political scenes. Everywhere one looks, one sees mountebanks, liars, fools, evil doers, and just plain dopes at work--and all aided by a grotesquely incompetent, lazy, and leftist mass media.

Where to start?

How about our amazing Vice President Joe Biden? Without doubt, he is one of the stupidest politicians on the global scene--he even gives Britain's Clare Short a run for the title of Dopus Maximus. Any conservative politician with his record of plagiarism, malapropism, buffoonery, vanity, and pure unadulterated idiocy would have been laughed off the stage long ago. Not Joe, however. No, not Joe.  The press finds him "charming," a man who connects with the simple people, a man with a good heart, etc.

Now we see this philosopher viceroy lecturing gun owners with a series of made up stuff--I believe the formal term is "lies."  His little homespun homilies on the advice he supposedly gives his vacuous "educator" wife on self defense most certainly would appear to fall into the category of lies. Does anybody believe that he and his wife have talked about gun ownership? That he has advised her to get a shotgun because they live out in the middle of nowhere? That he has told his wife to fire "both barrels" into the air if she hears anybody prowling about the property? I wonder how the legion of Secret Service agents he has protecting him would respond to that? What total nonsense. He proceeds from this base of lies to tell us that we "don't need AR-15s" because, well, he finds them "hard to aim," and that everybody should buy a shotgun for home defense. In other words, what he doesn't like, or doesn't know how to use, that should be banned. He will tell us what we "need." He does all this in the guise of being a "friend" to gun owners, and the press goes along. I suppose next he will tell us we don't "need" any car than can go more than 45 mph. We don't "need" 300 brands of yogurt, or more than one TV or more than one candidate in an election. He will tell us what we "need," what we should have. Joe knows. Joe knows.

Senator McCain: An undoubtedly brave man in war, who withstood torture, and turned down repeated offers to capitalize on his father's fame and rank and get released early from the Vietnamese prison hell where he rotted. He, however, insists on pretending that he is a Republican conservative. His inept, half-hearted campaign in 2008 is why we now have to live with the Obama nightmare. He should retire or just become a Democrat and stop living the lie. He wanted desperately to be Teddy "U-Boat" Kennedy's best friend. He can't bring himself to oppose the treasonous Kerry as Secretary of State, or help stop the foolish and destructive Hagel as Secretary of Defense. He is trying to sell a snake oil immigration plan, and the only people calling him on it are some of his constituents who have had enough of his Washington nonsense, and who, unlike their Senator, seem to know what is happening along the border. McCain continues to seek the favor of the editorial writers at the Washington Post and the New York Times, when, in fact, almost nobody in the country cares what those people say.

The list goes on and on. On the international scene the world has the gangster Putin and his Foreign Affairs Frank Nitti, Sergey Lavrov. It has the malevolent Castro brothers, the putrid Chavez, the insane Correa, the thieving Ortega, the disaster of the "Arab Spring,"and the defiant Kim Jung-Un threatening fire and brimstone. What do we have? John Kerry who can't even get Lavrov (whom I know) to return his calls. And, of course, we have that other man, that one who makes Carter appear Lincolnesque and Churchillian . . . you know who, the guy on the golf links.

The European scene is equally as bleak. Britain's leadership is a gang of squabbling clowns content to watch their once very great nation descend into the Euro muck, and allow London, one of my favorite cities, to become a Third World slum full of crooks, welfare manipulators, and scads of people who hate the country that has given them safe harbor. France is done for; Spain, Greece, Italy all on the verge of collapse and dependent for survival on the already strained and sputtering German economy.

All of you can add hundreds of names to the above list. A most depressing exercise.

I need a break. Going to save my pennies, buy the new Stingray and drive off into the sunset before the political correctness cops come knocking.